Simulation Architect

About the company

Aaru provides near-instant customer research by using AI agents to simulate human behavior and predict market responses.

About this role

ABOUT AARU Aaru operates at the bleeding edge of predictive intelligence, using AI to simulate and predict human behavior at scale. By generating and deploying instances of artificial intelligence that mirror humans, called agents, Aaru simulates entire populations with unprecedented accuracy. Our partners use Aaru to refine strategic positioning, identify and understand high-value audiences, validate concepts and messaging before launch, optimize pricing decisions, and build a continuously richer understanding of their customers through simulation. We provide organizations with invaluable foresight, empowering them to anticipate outcomes and proactively make the right decisions at the right time, every time. We're a small, dedicated, mission-driven team and we intend to stay that way. We believe the best work happens when exceptionally talented people are given ownership, trust and the space to operate without bureaucratic friction. We work with urgency and intellectual honesty and expect new team members to match our velocity. We seek individuals who thrive at the frontier, who push beyond conventional limits, who bring curiosity and conviction in equal measure, and who want their work to have demonstrable impact in the world. If you're energized by the idea of a small team doing things that feel impossible, let’s build together. ABOUT THE ROLE Simulation Architects are the methodological authority in Aaru's sales process. Where a traditional Solutions Engineer proves that software runs, you prove that a simulation is right, and you do it in front of the hardest audience in our market: senior insights and research leaders who have spent careers mastering the methods we are asking them to move beyond. Your room is not a CTO asking about scalability. It is a Head of Insights asking why a simulated audience should beat the tracker they have run for nine years. You win that room because you have run that tracker. You have designed the sampling frames, built the weighting schemes, defended the confidence intervals, and lived through the quiet degradation of panel quality that the industry rarely says out loud. You can prosecute the case for simulation with the credibility of someone who mastered what came before it, and you can state its limits with the honesty that makes senior buyers trust the rest. You will lead methodological discovery, design the simulations that anchor our proofs of concept, and stand behind the accuracy and validation frameworks that our customers use to defend their decisions internally. You are the person our buyer points to when their CMO asks how we know this is right. RESPONSIBILITIES - Own the methodological conversation in the sales process: audience construction, representativeness, response synthesis, calibration, and what confidence in a simulated distribution actually means - Translate ambiguous business questions into well-specified simulation designs, including audience definition, stimulus design, and the evaluation standard a result must meet - Design and interpret proof of concept evaluations, including validation against a prospect's own historical research where available - Prosecute the comparison to traditional methods credibly and fairly: where simulation outperforms trackers, surveys, and panels, where it does not yet, and why - Equip champions to defend simulation-based decisions internally, producing the methodological narratives, validation records, and boundary statements they carry into their own rooms - Partner with Account Executives through the full cycle as the interpretive counterpart to their commercial lead, and with Deployment through handoff so the standard set in the sale is the standard met in delivery - Serve as a structured feedback channel into product and research, translating methodological objections from the field into platform priorities - Contribute to Aaru's public methodological voice: accuracy frameworks, validation publications, and industry conversations YOU MAY BE A FIT IF - You have 7 or more years in consumer insights or market research with genuine quantitative depth: research design, sampling and weighting, tracker and survey methodology, segmentation, or advanced analytics, at an agency, panel provider, or in-house insights function - You have personally designed and defended research methodology to senior, skeptical stakeholders, and have owned the consequences when a study informed a consequential decision - You are statistically fluent. You can reason about distributions, confidence, bias, and validity in plain language, and you know the difference between directional accuracy and predictive validity without looking it up - You can argue against the methods you built your career on, without flinching and without overclaiming. You have watched response rates fall and panels condition, and you have a view on it - You are energized rather than threatened by AI's arrival in your field, and you would rather define how simulation is judged than defend how research used to be done - You are comfortable representing Aaru in senior client settings, including CMO and C-suite conversations, and can hold credibility against a trained methodologist motivated to find the hole - You are prepared to work fully in person in San Francisco YOU DO NOT NEED - A computer science degree or professional engineering experience. Technical depth on simulation configuration sits alongside you, not inside you. Your job is judgment, not deployment - Prior sales or solutions engineering experience. We will teach you the deal. We cannot teach a decade of research practice LOCATION This role is based in San Francisco. Aaru is an in-person company, working 5 days a week in office. Candidates are expected to be located within the San Francisco metro area or open to relocation. BENEFITS At Aaru, we take care of our people. In addition to a competitive base salary and equity particip